CHICAGO -- Motorola, Packard Instrument, and the US government's Argonne National Laboratory said Monday they have teamed up to mass produce "biochips," devices akin to computer chips, with widespread implications in medicine and agriculture.
Like computer chips, which perform millions of mathematical operations a second, biochips can perform thousands of biological reactions, such as decoding genes, in seconds.
Motorola (MOT) will develop the manufacturing process for the chips and Packard, a subsidiary of Connecticut-based Packard BioScience Co., will make instruments to analyze them.
The pre-production costs of these machines -- the so-called imager and arrayer -- are initially put at US$30,000 and $75,000. Chips could initially cost about $100 each, but the price could eventually be a dollar or less, the companies said.
Argonne and the Russian Academy of Science's Englehardt Institute of Molecular Biology, based in Moscow, are providing 19 inventions related to the biological microchips, while Motorola and Packard will contribute a total of $19 million over five years to support the joint research. Argonne's inventions are licensed exclusively to the two companies.
These biochips employ "micro-gel" technology in which microscopic structures -- as many as 10,000 or more on a glass surface about the size of a single microscopic slide -- act like mini test tubes. Within each micro-gel structure, chemical compounds can be tested against biological targets to provide answers to questions such as DNA sequence, genetic variation, gene expression, protein interaction, and immune response.
The chips work faster than conventional methods.
"Instead of reading DNA one letter or word at a time, the biochips read whole phrases and sentences at a time," said Andrei Mirzabekov, a biologist whose research at Argonne and Engelhardt developed the biochips.
In a telephone news conference, US Energy Secretary Federico Pena called the project one of "profound importance to all Americans." The Energy Department has funded the project in conjunction with the Human Genome Project, a task to map the entire set of human chromosomes by 2005. Pena said it could be the birth of a new multibillion-dollar industry.
The partners expect the greatest impact to be felt in the field of medical diagnostics. They say researchers would be able to identify in minutes mutated genes that could lead to later medical problems, such as cancer, multiple sclerosis, or Alzheimer's.
Widespread use of biochips could remove the guesswork from early treatment of many diseases. On-the-spot identification of specific bacteria, such as Streptococci in a sick child, viruses, and other micro-organisms, would be possible, the partners said.
Other uses are foreseen. "With a commercial biochip to rapidly and economically perform genetic analysis, within a few years we should see better pharmaceuticals developed more rapidly," said Richard McKernan, president of Packard Instrument Co. In agriculture, he sees improved crop strength and better breeding and disease detection in animals.
Motorola's vice president, Rudyard Istvan, declined to give revenue projections from the biochip venture but said initial production will take place in the United States by conversion of some of the company's existing plants. The partners see drug companies as the first customers, with universities and large labs worldwide joining in down within four or five years. Eventually, they foresee doctors having this technology in their offices.
